Dropping Dimes

The other night I had a dream that I was jumping around on rooftops and doing ninja like moves, all while trying to help a friend find his way to something I didn’t quite know. It was that classic dream where you have a mission that you don’t know what it is, but you have to do it, and I am defying gravity with huge rooftop leaps and flips. I was loving the dream until it got weird. As I was traveling at a high velocity through the air I saw a coin on the roof. So, in the dream I stopped to pick up the coin. It was a dime, and I heard a voice in my dream me’s head that said, “If you can take care of a dime, you can take care of a fortune.” I woke up at that point and was really analyzing what this could have meant in my life. I’m pretty sure I never had that phrase said to me before, and why would that happen in a dream with so much action and drama and no money at all in it. How would I have seen the tiny dime moving at such a high speed, and it was night in the dream, while I was flipping so naturally. There are so many questions to be answered!

So the first train of thought I had was amazement at the ridiculousness of the situation, then I was concerned I was a little bit money crazy, then I thought this must mean something bigger. That the universe or God is trying to tell me something important. I haven’t found the meaning of the story yet, but I decided to research the dime and see if I could uncover anything.

As I researched our 1/10 of a dollar denomination I knew it had Franklin D. Roosevelt on the front and a torch on the back, but I also learned that on the back there is an olive branch and an oak branch. They stand for liberty, peace, and strength. It has 118 ridges on the outside and it is .705 inches in diameter. It also cost 5.65 cents to produce each dime. It is made up of 75% copper and 25% nickel, and it is so small because when it was made of real silver in the old days, they had to make sure there was less silver to keep the value down. So, they made the dime smaller then the rest of the coins. FDR’s charity, The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, was later renamed the “March of Dimes.”

People use dimes in slang terms all the time such as in basketball a good pass is “dropping a dime”or you can buy drugs in “dime bags” in the movies. Also you can shop in “dimes stores” or “five and dimes.” People talk about getting “nickel and dimed” when they are shopping and small fees pop up (airline baggage fees). People brag about being able to “stop on a dime,” which is exactly what I did in the dream. Some people talk about a “tithe” to a church, and use the dime as an example of giving their 10% to God. People use to read “dime novels” in the old days about cowboys and adventurers. You use to be able to buy candy a “dime a dozen” in my grandfather’s day. People are ready to fight at the “drop of a dime,” and life can “turn on a dime” so you better be ready for changes.

My grandmother once told me a jingle that stuck with me ever since I first heard it when I was about seven. It went like this:

“Here I sit all broken hearted, paid a dime, but only farted.” She had to explain the idea of a pay toilet to me right afterwards, then I laughed.

Other famous dime quotes:

Yogi Berra once said, ” A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Brad Pitt said, “Heart throbs are a dime a dozen these days.”

Another famous quote is, “If I had a dime everytime____________happened, I’d be rich.”

Robert Kiyosaki said, ” Excuses cost a dime, and that’s why the poor could afford a lot of it.”

The dream was weird and strange, but it did teach me a lot about our dime. It may even make me a few dimes on some bar bets one day. I mean who really knows how many ridges are on the outside of the dime anyways (118). Also, who founded the March of Dimes makes “cents” now, but it was a mystery before the dream. So dream on good people, defy gravity, fight villains, and make sure you always stop to pick up loose dimes. Comment if you know the answer to my weird dime dream, and help me understand the meaning of it all.